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Sunday, July 20, 2008

Watchmen movie trailer and Alan Moore interview

Well, no doubt you'll have seen, read, heard about this already, but the Watchmen movie trailer is playing right now pretty much everywhere.

And having seen it, I have to go along with the note of very cautious optimism. It's looking visually very impressive indeed and certainly plays out many scenes we all know and love from the graphic novel. But I couldn't help thinking it all looked too clean and crisp to be the Watchmen. It's a dirty, grimy, society gone wrong graphic novel with even the most beautiful of superheroes looking tarnished, but in all of the scenes in the trailer I just felt this was missing and it looked too artificial.

Time will tell. Specifically 2009, when we all pop along to our local movie palace and watch the Watchmen for ourselves. But there's still part of me that feels guilty for even partly looking forward to it. It seems like I'm somehow being unfaithful to Alan Moore. Bad me.

And speaking of Alan Moore and Watchmen, Entertainment Weekly also has an interview with the great man. Well worth reading as always. Take this; asked if he's even interested in the movie and having been told that director Zack Snyder is meant to be a really nice guy:

He may very well be, but the thing is that he's also the person who made 300. I've not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn't particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: [that] it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that's not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but...I wasn't impressed with that.... I talked to [director] Terry Gilliam in the '80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ''Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, 'I wouldn't.''' And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can't.